A term you'll meet in literary criticism.
Allegory and symbol are the two classical ways of building meaning beyond the literal surface of a text. They are often used interchangeably in casual conversation, and the conflation costs you precision. Critics from Coleridge onward have treated the distinction as central to literary analysis.
An allegory is a sustained, systematic correspondence between the literal surface of a story and a second, abstract meaning. The elements of the story map, often one-to-one, onto an abstract scheme — moral, religious, political — that exists independently of the story.
Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is the textbook English example. Christian, the protagonist, journeys from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, meeting characters named Faithful, Hopeful, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Giant Despair. Each character and place corresponds to a specific theological idea. The correspondences are explicit and stable.
Other classical allegories: Dante's Divine Comedy (though more layered than pure allegory), Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Orwell's Animal Farm (the Russian Revolution mapped onto a barnyard), and many medieval morality plays.
A symbol, by contrast, is an image that stands for something else without a fixed scheme of meaning. A symbol is open-ended; an allegory's meanings are nailed down. Coleridge's famous distinction in The Statesman's Manual (1816): allegory is a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language; the symbol participates in the reality it stands for.
Melville's white whale in Moby-Dick is the most-discussed symbol in American literature precisely because it refuses to settle into one meaning. Ahab reads it as malevolence; Ishmael reads it as inscrutable nature; later critics have read it as God, evil, the unconscious, capital, race. The whale resists single translation. That refusal is what makes it a symbol rather than an allegory.
| Allegory | Symbol |
| Fixed, systematic correspondence. | Open, polyvalent. |
| Meaning exists prior to the text. | Meaning arises through the text. |
| Decodable. | Interpretable. |
Coleridge (and the Romantics generally) treated symbol as artistically superior. Allegory, for them, was a translation — the real meaning was elsewhere, and the story was a vehicle. Symbol was the real thing — meaning embedded in the image, not paraphrasable. Their argument shaped 19th- and 20th-century criticism, which often treats "merely allegorical" as a put-down and "symbolic" as praise.
The hierarchy has loosened. Modern critics — Walter Benjamin notably — have rehabilitated allegory as the more historically honest mode. Benjamin argued that allegory's openly artificial correspondences are more truthful about how meaning is constructed than symbol's pretense of natural unity.
Most real texts mix the two. Dante's Inferno has allegorical structure (sins arranged into circles) but symbolic images (Geryon, the dark wood) that exceed any allegorical scheme. Kafka's The Trial looks allegorical (a man tried by an inscrutable court) but refuses to provide the key — the allegorical shape with no allegorical content is its own technique.
When a text seems "deeper than itself," ask: does it translate, or does it resonate? An allegory translates: there is a paraphrase, and you can extract it. A symbol resonates: any paraphrase shrinks it. Both modes are doing legitimate work — the choice tells you something about what the writer thinks meaning is.
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